Adventures in journalism

Testing BubblePLY on video news stories

When I was a young reporter on a paper Down South a colleague once revealed, in hushed tones, that: “Our IT system puts the ‘IT’ in shit”. Not necessarily fair, but very funny… and sometimes trying to work with new web apps on internal system set-ups designed to be suspicious can lead to exasperations. This week a colleague spent a frustratingly long amount of time trying to upload a video interview done of a Flip by a reporter, only to find out… a) the software wasn’t loaded on her machine andb) she couldn’t load it because of various IT lockdowns…

So, knowing I’d somehow managed to load the Flip software, she asked me to give it a try. I managed to upload it, send it to my Youtube channel where it was converted to the necessary FLV file, and she was then able to put it on our website. Convoluted and time-consuming but it worked… and it meant I also had a spare news video on my YouTube channel to play around. So I thought I’d have a go with a site I’ve been eyeing for a while without having time to do anything with it- BubblePly.

BublePLY has recently been tweaked to allow live links, full control over fonts and more use of images, and you can use your own, or just put a video url in the search facility and layer the data on top of it. The original doesn’t change but you can embed the new version, or link to it, as you want. Having (very quickly) tried it out I found it pretty straightforward to use:

Then I tried it on a Qik film I’d live-streamed earlier this year and copied to YouTube, and while the film quality isn’t a patch on the Flip video, I prefer it:

This is probably one of the most user-friendly tools I’ve come across, and it’s very effective. It was simply a case of copying a link, adding some texts and links, and then copying the code to embed. I like this – it’s an effective, fast and easy way of telling a story, and sharing it quickly. There’s only one downside – BubblePLY doesn’t work on my office computer!

5 thoughts on “Testing BubblePLY on video news stories”

Hi Craig, I’d use BubblePLY as a tool to layer information on top of a clip, which I would then embed somewhere else, rather than as a hosting site. I’d prefer to save the ply or copy the code than link to it. I’d do the same with an Ask500 People poll purely because (my personal preference) I like seeing the app rather than following the link.Qik is good for connecting instantly with an audience, capturing an event or a happening, or having a conversation in real time. When I’ve used it for liveblogging the audience does follow the link to view it (and never seems bothered about the quality of the film) but such clips can lack context, and so don’t have a Long Tail. However, by cross-posting that qik clip to YouTub or Vimeo you could then add context with BubblePLYFor example: A newspaper could qik an event live to an audience using a link for them to follow; then run it through YouTube, copy the url of the film to BubblePLY, add subtitles, information, photos etc; then use the embed code to build a 3rd party widget and place it on its own website so it works as a standalone film with its own built-in news captions. It would add context and depth to the report, and make it stickier. IMHO anyway… what do you think?

IMHO, IT lockdowns are a cause of constant frustration and actually get in the way of work all the time.Recently I had to hand off work because didn’t have the software – IT slow to correct that and am still waiting

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